Countries of the Americas defined actions to enhance food security and agricultural resilience

San Jose, 20 July 2022 (IICA) - The member countries of the Executive Committee of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) recognized the key importance of coordinated work among countries of the Americas to overcome the current food, nutritional and humanitarian crisis in the region and the world, and therefore endorsed collective action by the Americas to address these challenges.
 
This endorsement follows up on the call made by the Director General of IICA at the Summit of the Americas in June in Los Angeles, during which the Institute was called on to support an initiative of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to deliver food and humanitarian aid to Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as other projects that may arise with the same objective. 
 
IICA’s Executive Committee also expressed support for raising the profile of the agriculture sector at the upcoming Conference of the Parties (COP27) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), to be held in November 2022 in Egypt.
 
To this end, the countries instructed the Institute to develop key messages for the ministers of the Americas who will participate in the meeting, to be approved at the Ministerial Meeting on Climate Change and Agriculture, to be held in September in Costa Rica. 
 
They also requested that a pavilion be installed at COP27 to show the progress, challenges, priorities and proposals of the agriculture sector in its fight against climate change, as well as the benefits that greater resilience in the sector would generate in terms of food and nutritional security, water management, poverty reduction and the reduction of land and soil degradation, among other things.
 
Following a presentation by renowned Argentinian scientist and IICA Chair in Biotechnology and Sustainable Development, Raquel Chan, the members of the Executive Committee reiterated the importance of innovation, science and technology to make agrifood systems of the Americas more productive, sustainable and inclusive, and urged the Institute’s member countries to continue strengthening their capabilities in these areas and their linkages with the agriculture sector. 
 
The Committee also approved IICA’s 2022-2026 Medium-term Plan (MTP) as the guiding framework for technical cooperation activities during that period.

More information:
Institutional Communication Division.
comunicacion.institucional@iica.int